Colin Faver, DJ - obituary

DJ and champion of 'acid house’ who was a fixture on Kiss FM

Colin FaverPhoto: Alamy

5:19PM BST 08 Sep 2015

Colin Faver, who has died aged 63, was an important figure in the development of British club culture from its beginnings in one-off nights in London in the late 1970s to the multi-national business of today.

Faver’s career as a DJ was one of the most enduring, spanning more than four decades, and he is recognised by dance music cognoscenti as an early champion of the genres which still provide the soundtrack to nightlife around the world. These were particularly the techno and house styles – electronic dance music using fast tempo and pulsating bass lines – developed by black musicians in such cities as Chicago and Detroit during the 1980s.

A founder of the pirate station Kiss FM – now a mainstream national broadcaster – Faver was also among those who fostered the acid-house and rave explosions of the late 1980s.

Colin Faver was born in east London on December 24 1951 and educated at Plaistow Grammar School. After leaving school he became a commercial artist and in the late 1970s he took a job presenting the weekly Sunday radio show at Moorfields Eye Hospital (where, Faver recalled, he was sacked for playing songs by the Sex Pistols rather than patients’ requests for Andy Williams).

He was soon recruited by his friend Pete Stennett to Stennett’s Walthamstow record shop Small Wonder, which operated a music label and became one of the centres for the British post-punk scene. Faver designed sleeves for the label’s releases and was instrumental in signing such acts as The Cure and Bauhaus. In the early 1980s he set up, with Kevin Millins, Final Solution, a live promotion agency; among the bands which were publicised by the company during this period were Joy Division, New Order, Throbbing Gristle, Nick Cave’s band The Birthday Party and Culture Club, featuring Boy George.

The Hacienda club in Manchester Photo: Rex Features

By this time Faver had crossed over into the nascent DJ circuit, spinning a catholic selection of tracks from indie rock to reggae at such central London venues as the Marquee before becoming a mainstay of the first super-club, the Camden Palace, where he occupied a residency for six years playing a diverse range of styles from hip hop to the gay Hi-NRG electro music.

Faver was an evangelist for acid house in the late 1980s and he also became a fixture behind the decks of such club-nights as Shoom in Southwark and the Hacienda in Manchester. At one stage, he had weekly residencies at Heaven and the Wag in London, as well as at Rex Club in Paris. This led to international bookings and Faver toured Europe and Australia, Japan and North America.

When Kiss FM gained legal status in 1990 Faver remained on the roster as a regular DJ, presenting a variety of shows on the station including the weekly techno broadcast which ran until 1997. He also promoted techno in the 1990s with Knowledge, the London club-night he ran with his partner Brenda Russell. “It was a wonderfully demented sweat-bin,” wrote one music journalist.

Softly spoken and entirely lacking in ego, in recent years Faver found that his musical tastes had shifted from techno to more melodic material he featured on the digital radio station Mi-Soul. His views on the work of a DJ in a world that was increasingly dominated by egotistic self-promoters were delightfully unpretentious.

“I remember Colin playing house music when it didn’t have a name,” recalled his fellow DJ Mark Moore of S’Express. “His shows on Kiss FM were events in their own right. One time in 1987 he rang [the Detroit producer] Derrick May live on air hoping to get an impromptu interview. Instead he got the answering machine so mixed Derrick’s answer message into one of the tunes he was playing. Colin was always in the mix.”